Microsoft strolls down memory lane to promote IE to the children of the 90's

Looks like giant software companies fall prey to the same nostalgia that afflicts people when they approach their forties. To promote their IE11 browser, Microsoft has decided to target the 80's and 90's generation with a very nostalgic video called "Child of the 90's".

Even if they might have their own agenda, trying to make parents use IE11 so it might "rub off" to their children, the truth is that it doesn't really matter which browser you use or will use after this clip in order to appreciate it: Yo-yo's, walkmans, tamagotchis, floppy disks, modems - you name it!

Sure, I feel kind of scared knowing that most younger people will look at this the same way I looked at things from the 60's - but hey, just you wait for it, give it 20 or 30 years and Justine Bieber and One Direction will be "those guys old people like"! :)

The only difference is that while we had 14Kbaud modems and 720Kb floppys, they'll might be able to joke around about how ridiculous it was to have just 50GB blurays and 1Gbit internet. (And hopefully, by then we won't have to complain about mobile devices battery life only barely making it to the end of the day.)

MS to Pay 561 Millions to Europe for Lack of Browser Choice

The European Comission has fined Microsoft in 561 million euros for not fulfilling what they agreed to in regards of browser choice in Windows. MS had been found guilty of abusing its dominant position to force their own Internet Explorer browser onto users. They agreed they would show up a browser choice screen to european customers, so everyone could choose their preferred browser, for five years (until 2014).

However the EC has found that from May 2011 to July 2012, Microsoft failed to do so in the Windows 7 SP1, leaving 15 million european users without that browser choice screen. I think it would be far more important to educate users so they know they have alternatives, without being required to have them shoved in our faces as morons. Likewise, if the EC is so worried about the lack of browser choice, why don't they worry about far more closed platforms, as Apple's iOS, where competing browsers don't even get the chance to provide a real alternative (they can't even access the full Safari javascript performance!) Wouldn't that deserve the same treatment as the one given to MS?

In any case, I'm not fond of Internet Explorer, particularly when recently I found I couldn't even use it to download Google's Chrome browser. When headed to the main chrome page, clicking the download button... did nothing at all. I had to search around in secondary pages till finally founding a real link that worked. Maybe the problem is Internet Explorer, maybe it's Google's script for the button click action; the scary part is that something as simple as downloading a file has now become so complex that we're not even sure we can do it. And that's... very wrong and worrying.

Internet Explorer 7 Tax

An Australian online store decided it had waited enough for its customers to update to a more recent browser, and to make sure they did they came up with an original way to slightly "nudge" them in the right direction: adding a 6.8% IE7 Tax to anyone using that browser to buy in their store.

The IE 7 browser is now five years old, and completely "obsolete" in technological terms. In fact, even though it's used by just a small number of users, it requires lengthy (and often annoying) special cases and workarounds to make web pages look like they're supposed to, and that's precisely why kogan.com decided to charge a little bit extra for it.

... I just think there would be lot more situations where we could use similar techniques... don't you?

Serious Internet Explorer Vulnerability (Yep, another one)

Another seriou security flaw affect Microsoft's Active X in Internet Explorer.

I'll say it quicklu: you visit a compromised web page and... that's it; you can have your computer "infected" and running any program the attackers want, from keyloggers to spywares, to... you name it.



This attack uses a vulnerability in the Microsoft's ActiveX video and affects Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (why, oh why should a server OS have this kind of "features"?) but as MS is so sure about its products, it recommends you do the same even if you have Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Though unaffected by this vulnerability, Microsoft is recommending that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 customers remove support for this ActiveX Control within Internet Explorer using the same Class Identifiers as a defense-in-depth measure.

To be safe(r) you need to disable ActiveX video in IE - or - may I suggest, use *any* other browser: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari... anything will be better than IE!

I know lots of you never used anything but IE, and it might feel a little awkward at first, but believe me you'll soon be asking yourself: why didn't I changed browsers a lot sooner?


Now, let's hope MS doesn't try leveling the playing fields by introducing potential vulnerable plugins in the other browsers (without consent from its users!) instead of fixing their own problems.

Google Crashing IE in Blogger?

Today, I have received some "complaints" that some of my blogs were causing errors in Internet Explorer.

The error shows up in different IE versions, from IE 6.0 to IE 8.0 and pops up an "Operation Aborted" error windows.

I googled around and found references to sitemeter (which I don't use) and problems with scripts accessing the body element in IE.

The problem is... I haven't changed anything in my blogs lately... so... I was wondering what could have been causing this.
I suspected it might have been one of the widgets I use, so I proceeded to remove those... but the problem was still there.
Even stranger, in some blogs - using the exact same widgets - everything worked fine... while in others, it didn't.

In Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, everything worked fine as usual... this was just affecting IE.

In the end, after removing most of the external scripts and widgets, my attention turned to Google's own services: all that is left is Google Ads and Google Analytics (besides Google's own blogger plataform blogspot.)
A few minutes ago, a friend told me the Google object in javascript was indeed causing some errors.

Has anyone else faced the same problem lately?

[update]
Blogger team is looking into it.

[update #2]
It's seems the problem is caused by Google's Followers Widget - I've removed it until the problem is fixed.

Firefox to Lend a Hand to Internet Explorer

Just to prove how friendly Firefox and Internet Explorer development teams really are, see what they have done:

As Microsoft's Internet Explorer lags behind the implementation of the latest HTML standards - in this case the canvas element from HTML5 - one of Mozilla's engineers has decided to add that support to IE by creating an Active X for that purpose.

The web can only move forward if browsers really follow these HTML standards. Otherwise, few people would develop a "next-gen" web 3.0 site if they knew people using IE would be unable to see it as it's intended.

This way, even if Microsoft has no plans on supporting HTML standards (something that has caused major headaches for web developpers  for as long as I can remember) Mozilla has done the job for them.


What have we come to... Mozilla helping Internet Explorer... geeezzzz

And if you're curious about this "canvas" thing, check out what it can do: a 3D FPS game (also available in a textured version.)

IE6 R.I.P.

February 12th, 2007 - Internet Explorer 6 - R.I.P.

The time has come, say goodbye to IE6 (for those of you who haven't done it yet.)
On February 12th, Microsoft will enforce a mandatory upgrade to the newer IE7.

Goodby IE6, I'm not sure if you'll be missed... too many web designers and programmers have spent countless hours debugging scripts and css because of you.

If you're already using Firefox, or any other browser that treats web standards as real standards, you can disregard this post. :)

[Microsoft]